Ascent Strategy

I want to talk about every business’ worst nightmare – landing in the spam folder.
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Whether you’re a business that emails your audience frequently, you send 1:1 cold emails individually, or you’re about to embark on email outreach for your business — this is a must-read, save this post for later!
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Getting emails out of your leads’ spam folders is a serious problem that not many people know how to properly come back from. Once your emails land in people’s spam folders it’s a multi-month helluva process of getting your emails out of the Bermuda Triangle – most don’t come back, but you can if you patiently & proactively take these steps below.
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1. Avoid using spam trigger words in your subject lines. Search Google for spam trigger words to get an exhaustive list.
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2. Spend a lot of time on your subject line. Think about the desirability of your subject line in an inbox with 500 emails. If your subject line is bland, no one’s going to read all the juicy content inside.
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3. There’s a reason why you see my name as the sender of my emails and not Ascent Strategy (if you're not subscribed, head over to my link in bio!) — email platforms favor emails from actual people.
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If this is an option for you, make your name known but take the time to ease your audience into this if they’ve been seeing your brand name in your inbox for a while. This isn’t an option for everyone though, so make sure you’re doing the marketing work so that your audience loves hearing the name of your brand.
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3. Don’t ever buy email lists, or add people without their consent (even friends, always ask first). This is bad behavior in the email world that lands you in people’s spam folders.
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👉🏽 There's SO much more you need to know about getting your emails out of spam, read the full blog post at the link in bio.

As a woman of color, having built and run 3 businesses has equally been a life-changing path for me as it has been a harsh, as***le of a teacher.

There’s no question that I would’ve lived in a completely different universe if entrepreneurship never entered my life. Entrepreneurship turned my parents from immigrants with $1 to their name to successful storefront owners in one of Manhattan’s busiest neighborhoods. Their experience influenced my journey and snowballed it into where I am now.

I’ve learned a lot from this journey, including getting hyper-educated about money, what privilege looks like to different groups of people, and how BIPOC entrepreneurship looks different from non-BIPOC folks.

The money lessons were hard — it sucked to experience scarcity and cutting corners when I was chasing ambitions that deserved more. It was hard to unlearn how I grew up with money (from parents who grew up in an impoverished country) when it completely opposed how I was encouraged to think about money as an entrepreneur.

As my perception got stronger, I was able to pick up on all the ways I and other women of color accrued wins at slower rates than men or white peers. Seeing that you have odds stacked against you is a hard pill to swallow, it makes your losses feel a bit more sour and like your wins are fleeting.

I’ve never felt angrier or more understood than connecting myself to other BIPOC entrepreneurs. When I get to know BIPOC entrepreneurs, I’m disappointed that we have similar experiences that are clearly a mountain range of patterns, but I feel comforted that we can connect over shared experiences and learn from them together.

(Continued in comments)

Taking advice from the myriad of online experts on how to build a business can be helpful until you start to get into the weeds of generating revenue.

Then the advice gets really unreliable.

Learning how an entrepreneur hit 7-figures in business is not helpful if you’re still operating under 6. Taking notes on Seth Godin’s marketing gems only gets you so far when there aren’t ex*****on steps to pair with it.

Startup intel can become a bust once you hit a certain threshold.

You can’t take the same cocktail that a VC-backed startup founder took and expect it to give your business the buzz it needs.

Here are three commonly shared tips that don’t work for most homegrown startups, and what works instead.

Marketing doesn’t always equate to sales, which makes it incredibly confusing if you’re an entrepreneur trying to understand where best to hedge your bets.

I’ve made the very expensive mistake of posting content on social media for years, without seeing any true ROI from it. I’ve been guilty of sending out emails that no one wanted to read, and taking too much advice from the Internet about aggressive marketing tactics that end up bugging people.

When did marketing get so complicated? In my opinion, marketing that produces sales shouldn’t require this much wayfinding. It’s simple when done right.

Here are the only three marketing actions you need to take if you want to cut through the BS and make some sales 👉🏼

Is pricing a presence in your life that’s constantly hovering in your mind and eating up your attention? Is it a thought you frequently come back to because it taps at your biggest insecurities? ​​​​​​​​
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​The less you know, the bigger the mystery pricing becomes. And the bigger the mystery pricing becomes, the less you want to fuss with it. Thankfully, pricing is something you can learn and gain confidence in with the right direction and some practice. Here are some examples of that 👇🏼​​​​​​​​
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1. Selling too much isn’t always a good sign. We all do a happy dance when we’re on a sales roll. Closing sales left and right makes you feel like a sales-closing master, when in truth, making too many sales can actually indicate a pricing issue.​​​​​​​​
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When you’re closing at an above-average close rate, it could be indicating that your pricing is too low and that you’re leaving money at the table. ​​​​​​​​
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2. You only thought about your numbers when pricing. Pricing isn’t just a numbers game, it’s also a brand perception game. Would you buy a handbag for $5 more if it meant that you were supporting an ethical and environmentally conscious business? The answer is always yes for me, and I bet for a lot of you as well. ​​​​​​​​
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Does your pricing bake in this perceived brand value or is it only calculated with material and operation costs in mind? If you have a strong brand reputation and your pricing doesn’t reflect it, that’s $5 per purchase you’re losing. ​​​​​​​​
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Pricing considerations like these are why it’s so important to grow your knowledge around the art of pricing. To help you with this, I’ve created two different tools that help you get more comfortable and less fearful of your pricing via my Pricing Playbook and Pricing Calculator for Service Providers. Both are under $50 and are ready to tutor you through all your pricing needs. ​​​​​​​​
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👉🏽Follow through to the link in bio to learn more.

The start of the year is an experimental month for many of us as we explore what works and doesn’t in helping improve our lives in the new year.
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A pet peeve of mine is when I waste hours of the day on nothing that felt meaningful to me. So for 2022, my goal was to live up to my desire to juice the productivity and intention out of every hour of my day — whether it’s personal or work-related.
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I consulted tried and true methods and did a lot of YouTube sleuthing to organize my experiment. I learned a lot to make meaningful progress on my work, health, and life admin goals and truly feel set in good, new habits for the new year.
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Here are some of my favorite changes that I set into motion in January 👉🏽 •
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Just because you’re a startup with a small budget, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should hire like one.​​​​​​​​
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Some businesses can make more sales by hiring more hands. Others need strategic guidance, not hands in order to increase their sales. If you’re in the I-need-strategy camp, then hiring backwards should be your focus. ​​​​​​​​
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The instinct reaction when you have money to spend on new hires is to put it towards the lowest hanging fruit — entry level coordinators and assistants. Entry level hires are helpful when your business is already thriving and all you need is upkeep to keep the car going. ​​​​​​​​
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They aren’t helpful when your business is trying to find footing around revenue stability and growth. Entry level hires don’t have the experience to bring much to the table in this respect, so this ends up being an investment that keeps your business operating at the level it’s currently at, but doesn’t elevate it. ​​​​​​​​
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If making more sales were as easy as hiring an assistant to send hundreds of cold emails, we’d all be wealthier entrepreneurs. Since this isn’t the case, think about who would drastically change the trajectory of your business and give it the boost it needs during a time when every input matters. ​​​​​​​​
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Would it be a sales guru who tags in for a few hours every quarter to supercharge your sales? A business coach who fine tunes your whole operation to triple its efficiency? ​​​​​​​​
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If you can’t pay the cost of a more high-level hire upfront, start saving the extra money you do have now until you hit a reserve to hire that person. Your investment will go much further that way. Making an intentional decision like this is what makes all the difference between an entrepreneur who’s getting by, and an entrepreneur who’s investing in a rocket ship.

I’m a year older today and this birthday in particular feels like I have a lot to celebrate. I learned so much in this past year about entrepreneurship and letting go of the old. Here were some lessons that were particularly meaningful to me —​​​​​​​​
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〰️ Surrender when it feels hard. My grit and resilience in continuously pushing through difficult moments saved my past businesses in monumental ways — it’s a coping mechanism that has been tried and true for me since I was little. ​​​​​​​​
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This past year though, I hit a lot of walls I couldn’t move past and my grit and resilience had no charm on breaking them down. I kept trying and trying, and nothing worked. I knew that continuously trying the same thing was ridiculous, so I learned how to surrender, even when it felt counterintuitive to do so. ​​​​​​​​
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Grit is a highly respected characteristic amongst entrepreneurs, but surrender is not. I spent the last year getting acquainted with surrender and witnessing all the ways in which it has helped me grow. And all the ways it’s a secret weapon. ​​​​​​​​
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〰️ Your work should be expansive, not limiting. I asked myself a lot of hard questions about my identity as an entrepreneur and whether it was expanding or limiting me at my current chapter of life. ​​​​​​​​
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There are numerous ways that entrepreneurship is expansive to step into when coming from a structured work background. The flipside of this is also true, there are ways that a structured work environment is expansive in ways that entrepreneurship can’t be. ​​​​​​​​
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No version of this is perfect, and being open-minded to both perspectives is what plants the seeds for interesting evolution. Pulling my ego walls down helped me come to an honest understanding on how to mold my professional growth in a way that feels expansive for me. ​​​​​​​​
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What are some meaningful lessons you experienced this year as you take another trip around the sun?

Content creation can feel like an overwhelming bottleneck if you have trouble sourcing new ideas. It can back up your whole marketing game if your ideas well is dry, and leave you out of touch with your audience.
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This is no bueno if you have a business to run — you don’t have time to waste contemplating content. Whether you’re hitting an inspiration wall or you need a content ideas boost, here’s a cheat sheet with starting points to help create an abundance of content for your ideas well.

A couple of weeks ago I kicked around the idea of creating an Entrepreneur Performance Review to help entrepreneurs assess their performance at the end of the year, similar to how an employee at a company is given a performance review by their boss. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I wanted to think through a tool that allows you to assess yourself as a boss to yourself.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The intention of this review is to put a spotlight on the areas of your startup journey (build, growth, self, rest) that need more work and cultivation.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I hope that doing this review gives you insight on the areas of your business you should focus on in the new year and helps you craft a 2022 agenda with fresh eyes.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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You can find the Entrepreneur Performance Review for your use at my link in bio. Fill it out and let me know how you did in your review!

There’s a park near my house that my dog voraciously pulls me towards every day. He is charging with all his strength to go see Chris (named changed for privacy), a boxing instructor who teaches classes in the park and feeds him bougie dog treats.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Chris loves dogs so much that he will actually stop his class if he sees my dog in the distance so that he can grab his bag of treats and feed him. I’ve seen dogs line up to get a treat from Chris and by my estimation, I think that he spends about $240/month on dog treats.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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It may seem like he has an expensive hobby, but Chris is no dumb dumb. The treats are a marketing expense. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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It’s not a surprise that I see students in his class working out with their dogs — Chris has converted a meaningful number of his visiting dog parents into students.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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What Chris has realized is that his students dominantly fit a specific profile — they're millennials, they like working out at spaces within walking distance to their home, and they have a fur baby.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Rather than hitting people over the head with pitches on how great his boxing classes are, Chris knows that this won’t work because there are hundreds of other workout classes in Brooklyn with the same pitch. What these classes don’t have that Chris has are weekly visits with potential customers (led by their dogs) who have grown to trust him.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I share this to say — marketing isn’t about 24/7 direct pitches about your product or service. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Sometimes it’s about knowing your customers well and appealing to the human in them who loves and is interested in a million other things. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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If you’re worried that you’ll seem random by talking about something other than your product, remember that Chris sold boxing classes with dog treats. What you talk about won’t seem random if it’s a part of your personality — no one’s all work and no play after all.